> I would love to know what the 4000+ staff do there
Usually when an engineer asks this question, they are starting with the assumption that most everyone who works there is an engineer. That assumption is usually wrong.
I have no inside information at all, but my guess is that engineers make up less than 1/3 of the employees. I'm sure the sales team is large, the product team is large, and the community management team is large. They probably also have a bunch of legal, and we know they have a lobbying group as well. And of course if you're taking people's money, you need a bunch of customer service to handle that.
When I worked there 14 years ago, we had at peak six engineers, and three non-engineers (one sales, one product, one community). But also we had the parent company providing legal (and there was a lot of legal requests even back then!), HR, facilities, finance, and basically all the other support tasks. And also we the engineers did a lot of it. We managed customer service for ads, we managed making t-shirts and plushies, we managed customer service for reddit gold payments, and a bunch of other "non-engineering" tasks.
The site is big and is transactional, which makes it a harder problem to solve. With the near-real-time display of votes and listing changes and comments, it's a lot more like eBay than Slashdot (which is what I would say at the time).
Usually when an engineer asks this question, they are starting with the assumption that most everyone who works there is an engineer. That assumption is usually wrong.
I have no inside information at all, but my guess is that engineers make up less than 1/3 of the employees. I'm sure the sales team is large, the product team is large, and the community management team is large. They probably also have a bunch of legal, and we know they have a lobbying group as well. And of course if you're taking people's money, you need a bunch of customer service to handle that.
When I worked there 14 years ago, we had at peak six engineers, and three non-engineers (one sales, one product, one community). But also we had the parent company providing legal (and there was a lot of legal requests even back then!), HR, facilities, finance, and basically all the other support tasks. And also we the engineers did a lot of it. We managed customer service for ads, we managed making t-shirts and plushies, we managed customer service for reddit gold payments, and a bunch of other "non-engineering" tasks.
The site is big and is transactional, which makes it a harder problem to solve. With the near-real-time display of votes and listing changes and comments, it's a lot more like eBay than Slashdot (which is what I would say at the time).